Knowledge Management

"Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes."
- Peter Drucker

Knowledge Management is a huge field, and comprises a range of practices used by organizations to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of what it knows, and how it knows it.

There is a broad range of thought on Knowledge Management, with many different definitions, approaches and perspectives.

PpcSoft iKnow is a personal knowledge manager, and is therefore much simpler and limited in scope. PpcSoft iKnow is not meant to replace a full knowledge management system, but rather complement it.

Successful Knowledge Management

Here is our simplified view on successful knowledge management:

1. Treat your employees well and empower them
2. Give them tools to maximize their personal knowledge
3. Give them tools to maximize their shared knowledge

Most companies start with the last item, by installing wikis, intranets and large multi-million knowledge management systems. Most of them fail....

If you want to retain the knowledge in your company, you must first retain your people! Much of the knowledge cannot be written down, and if you lose the knowledge worker, you'll lose much of the knowledge.

You must also create an environment where people want to use, increase and share their knowledge. When you have an environment like that you may give them tools and guidance to share their knowledge.

However, sharing knowledge is not a trivial task, even if you want to share. You need to decide what knowledge you have that can be of interest to others, you need to figure out who it may be interesting to, and you need to figure out how it should be presented to the others (which tool, which form etc).

The missing link

For most people in most companies, there is a missing link in knowledge management. Which tool is people using to store their own personal knowledge ?

In most cases, people rely on their brain and their memory. Some people may use notepad, keep some knowledge in e-mails or scribble something down in a notebook. But most don't. And management wants them to simply write down and share knowledge with others - just like that ?

PpcSoft iKnow is the missing link that will teach you how to collect information, connect and convert it into knowledge, and recollect the knowledge for re-use later.

Collect information

People collect information all the time - and most of the time they try to store the information in their brain. This leads to information overload for more and more people.

Connect and convert information to knowledge

If you read an article about Knowledge management on Wikipedia, you'll find a lot of information about the topic.

However, this information is probably not that useful for you or your organization - you need to connect the information from Wikipedia with the knowledge about you and your organization, and thereby converting the general information from Wikipedia into knowledge for you. You may then use this new knowledge to create a new knowledge management strategy for your organization.

Collecting, connecting, converting and creating knowledge is not easy - even if it is only for yourself !

PpcSoft iKnow to the rescue

PpcSoft iKnow is designed to help you with these tasks to make them as easy as possible. PpcSoft iKnow will let you collect and connect information very fast and very easy - but converting it into knowledge, and creating new knowledge is still mostly up to you, using your own brain.

Using PpcSoft iKnow for your own benefit and productivity will help you learn how to collect, connect, convert and create knowledge more efficiently as you get more used to it.

Enterprise Knowledge Management

When people in your organization master PpcSoft iKnow and their personal knowledge management, then you can try to teach them how to evaluate what other people in the organization may find useful. And then you can teach them how they share this knowledge in a consistent form that everybody in the organization agrees upon.

At this point, an Enterprise Knowledge Management system may become a success in your organization...